The Camino: Day 2

So the next day, Sunday, we slept in until ten in the morning which felt amazing! Before going of this trip I thought we would be waking up at seven every morning to get a head start on walking. Since there were not very many pilgrims on the trail in March, we got to sleep late almost every morning. :) we got our things together and went to take a look around Portomarin. The first thing we tried to find was a bakery but the closest we got was a grocery store. There we got baguettes, cheese, chocolate and nuts to eat along the trail. Most places were closed today since it was Sunday, making it hard to find a place for breakfast. Thankfully our alburgue did serve breakfast that morning and we had tostadas and butter and jelly and ham and cheese with cafe con leche. While we were out in the town we saw one of the buildings with the numbered bricks. There are four buildings in this city that had been moved brick by brick to the current location after the old town site had been flooded by the dammed up Miño River in the 1960s. While walking around in town that morning, fifteen euros seemed to have just flown out of my pocket. I did not spend them or anything, they were just gone! This was the day that I learned the hard way to keep your money in a sealed pocket. We started walking around one in the afternoon and after we had walked around eight kilometers we stopped in the very small town of Gonzar and refilled our water bottles and ate some of the snacks we had brought along. The apples in spain are absolutely delicious by the way :) It was around four thirty by then and we saw three other pilgrims that stopped at Gonzar to go to sleep for the night already. They had been walking since the early morning and some had come all the way from Sarria to Gonzar since the morning! I still had not developed any blisters thank goodness but Daddy's and Andrew's were getting worse :( We continued along the trail and we ended up walking in the dark for two hours today. It was very difficult to keep going. I did everything I could to push on and keep my mind on the walking, I counted steps between each half kilometer (670), I counted how many bottles of coke on the wall it took to go half a click (40-50), and I started chasing my head lamp and trying to step on the light just to keep my tired body moving forward in the darkness. We finally arrived at the next town, Palas de Rei, around 10:00 pm. The private alburgue we had hoped to stay in was closed so we had to stay at the public one with a huge group of other pilgrims. The showers had no curtains but at least they had hot water. I got over my shyness quickly and took a wonderful warm shower and got to know some Spanish girls about my age. We were in bed around eleven trying to sleep in a stuffy room full of snoring pilgrims.mwe knew we need to get some sleep because the public alburgues don't let you stay past eight in the morning. We would be up at seven. We did get some sleep despite the snoring and were ready to walk the next day. Santiago or bust!